It is with great pleasure that I introduce another key member of IBSG’s Manufacturing Practice, Diana Huang. As a key Industry Thought Leader, Diana has had a distinguished career at Cisco to date and is currently leading the Greater China team in helping Fortune 500 CEOs address their most strategic issues—from growth strategy, global expansion, operational efficiency, and leadership development, to innovation, technology in management, corporate culture, and employee training.

Huang is an active member of the Cisco Greater China leadership team, focusing on go-to-market strategies with transformational efforts, and is also executive sponsor of the Cisco Greater China Smart Grid Virtual Team. In addition, she is a member of the Board of Trustees for the International School of Beijing, where she co-chairs the resources committee.

Huang has 19 years of management consulting and industry experience in the United States and China. Prior to joining Cisco, she was a vice president and partner at A.T. Kearney. As a strategic adviser to senior leadership, Huang led teams that assisted both Chinese and multinational companies with strategic direction, organizational transformation, and operational efficiency improvements.

Prior to consulting, Huang was a research chemist. She has written a number of papers, including “Decoding the Cisco DNA,” “Eco-City: Will China Lead the World?”, and “China’s Response to Global Meltdown.”

It is with great pleasure I introduce Michael Schwarz as our latest Manufacturing Industry Thought Leader. Michael has a distinguished career at Cisco and is currently director of automotive EMEA within the global manufacturing practice of the Cisco Internet Business Solutions Group (IBSG).

In this role, Michael consults with senior executives from the auto industry looking to capitalize on the transformative power of the Internet for faster innovation, superior customer experience, and new business models.

Michael brings more than 15 years of top management consulting experience and solid industry knowledge to the organization. Before joining Cisco, he was a senior principal with Booz Allen Hamilton based in Munich and Chicago. There, he worked for clients in the automotive, aerospace, industrial goods, and financial services industries. Prior to Booz Allen Hamilton, he worked at Siemens Nixdorf and ZF Friedrichshafen. Read More »

As a core team member of IBSG’s manufacturing senior staff, he provides strategic assistance to car manufacturers and to related organizations looking to capitalize on the transformative power of new technologies. Marc consults with senior executives from the auto industry and coordinates Cisco’s global efforts to accelerate innovation and industry transformation in automotive.

Throughout the globe, Marc and his team have worked for most Auto OEMs on topics such Innovation, Connected Car, Customer Experience, Next Generation Dealers, the Car of the future, Distributed Engineering, and Corporate Culture.

As INSEAD and UC Berkeley Professor Morten Hansen says, “The goal of collaboration is not collaboration itself, but great results.”[1] Working with many of our customers, we’ve developed a framework for assessing the true ROI of collaboration, and it falls into three distinct categories:

Operational ROI allows you to assess how collaboration eliminates or avoid costs associated with running your business. You might cut travel, reduce infrastructure needs, lower bandwidth or energy costs, save on office space and so on. Collaboration tools can replace or reduce the need for many of these types of costs.

Productivity ROI refers to savings generated from more efficient processes, accelerated decision-making and reduced cycle times. Collaboration can lead to significant productivity gains in any number of ways, such as optimizing within lines of business or matching your organization’s expertise to opportunities early on.

Strategic ROI can be the hardest to measure, but perhaps the most transformative. This kind of ROI occurs when collaboration enables your business to take a giant leap forward in areas like enhancing customer satisfaction and loyalty, accelerating innovation, introducing new business models or entering new markets. These types of changes can also reshape an industry in fundamental ways.

These three types of ROI sometime manifest themselves differently across Read More »

I had the pleasure of meeting up with Arun recently. In his role as Global High-Tech Lead in IBSG, Arun has been instrumental in forming Cisco’s approach to Innovation – both inside Cisco and for our customers, as well as looking at global integration and collaboration for many of those customers. Arun has published many papers such as:

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